A client reported that a SmartConnect integration they’d been using for a couple of years had started failing regularly. It was scheduled to run in the early hours on every week day, but was failing most of the time; oddly, it was working sometimes.
If the integration was run manually it ran successfully every single time. When running on the schedule it failed more often than not.
There was an error writing to the pipe: Unrecognized error 232 (0xe8)
We made two changes to the setup after which the issue was resolved and the integration ran successfully.
We gave the service account permissions on SmartConnect database and we changed format of the service account from user@domain to domain\user.
The puzzling aspect of this error was that neither the service account nor the assigned permissions had been changed. Or at least no-one with the ability to make changes admitted to having done so.
There are two ways that a sandbox environment can be created in Dynamics BC. The first way, and the way I’m going to show in this post, will only create a sandbox environment containing the Cronus sample company; the second way is to make a copy of the production environment which I’ll show in a later post in this series.
To create the sandbox with Cronus, Click the “Tell me what you want to do” magnifying glass in the top right corner and type environment; click on Sandbox Environment:
Once you’re using Dynamics BC and have created a new company or copied one you will be working in a multi-company environment and will need to switch between them. As someone new to Dynamics BC, how to do this was not readily apparent to me.
To switch between companies in Dynamics BC, click the Settings cog button in the top right corner to open the Settings pane and click My Settings:
For SmartConnect 2018 and before the product is supported for three years on standard support and a further two years for extended support.
This means that SmartConnect 2018 is only under support until 15th December 2022; this means if you are using SmartConnect 2018 then you only have support on the product for another five months.
Versions of SmartConnect after 2018 use the “Modern Lifecycle Policy” which requires that customers stay current by always being on a supported release of SmartConnect which means applying at least one of the SmartConnect all-inclusive updates released within the last year from the current date. Basically, under the Modern Lifecycle you need to be applying one update per year for SmartConnect to remain on a supported version.
The following PowerShell command will execute curl passing in the authorization token and json parameters defined above the curl statement.
The main difference between this and curl on a normal command line is that you need to do curl.exe which is a built in alias for the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet:
The following PowerShell shows the format required for use in Curl (which I will cover in the next post of this series). It took me a number of attempts to get the format correct; the backticks (`) are needed to escape the double quotes (") for PowerShell and the backslashes (\) to escape them for the curl command:
In the last post, in this series, I showed how a new company can be created; which is fine if you’re creating a new company or deploying a new sample company, but sometimes you might want to create a copy of an existing company. This can be easily done through the Companies list. Click the “Tell me what you want to do” magnifying glass in the top right corner and type companies:
I am just over half way through my working life (24 years post university and 22 years until I reach the state retirement age) and after doing some serious thinking earlier this year, I decided that it was time to reassess what I was doing now and what I wanted/needed to be doing in future.
The result, as the title says, is that I am changing jobs and will, from today onwards, be working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and will no longer be working with Microsoft Dynamics GP.
This is a big change for me as I have been working with Dynamics GP for 19 years now, but it feels like the right time to make the change. It also means that I will no longer be the expert in the room and will need to get some serious learning done to get up to speed with Dynamics BC, which I have only lightly used so far.
Why the change? Well, as I say, I am half way through my working life and, while I still think that Dynamics GP is a great product, the future of SME ERP from Microsoft is Dynamics BC. While new features are introduced to Dynamics GP with the Fall release each year, these are now always minor functionality and I have concerns that as technology moves on that GP will get left behind. With 22 years of working life ahead of me, I don’t want to get stuck working only with older software applications.
I did consider moving outside of the Microsoft sphere, but ultimately decided that pretty much all of the software I use professionally is Microsoft. So it made sense to look for a Microsoft ERP in the SME market; Dynamics BC is that product from Microsoft which is actively maintained and integrated with new technologies and therefore provides me with the brightest future.
So having decided that I need to look at moving across to and cross-training into Dynamics BC, I decided that the best way of doing this was to move on from ISC Software. The company I am joining, as of today, is a triple Gold Microsoft Partner (Enterprise Resource Planning, Cloud Platform (Azure) and Application Development) and multiple-award winning company with 20 years experience with both Dynamics BC/NAV and in their sectors of operation. That company is 4PS UK which specialises in Dynamics BC for construction, civil engineering and related sectors.
In terms of this site, posts on Dynamics GP will pretty much stop in the coming weeks and I have already started posting about Dynamics 365 BC and have those posts syndicated to the Microsoft Dynamics Community; existing posts will continue to be available and will not be changed or redirected. I do have a small backlog of posts which I will work through over the next few weeks, so you will see some posts still appearing for a time on Dynamics GP; I am also going to go through my library of SQL scripts and see what I have which hasn’t been posted previously and which I think people may find useful.
The Microsoft Dynamics GP Table Reference site has recently been updated to the Fall 2021 Release and like the blog posts will continue to be available. I will not be taking the site down, but am unlikely to do any further updates to it as new versions are released; however, tables don’t change much in Dynamics GP any more so I’d expect the site to remain relevant for quite some time to come. As always, if you need table information for your specific version of Dynamics GP this is available in the GP Power Tools module available from, and actively maintained by, Winthrop DC.
As I leave the Dynamics GP Community, hopefully I will find a welcome and a place in the Dynamics BC community.
I leave you with a song, “Farewell”, from one of my favourite Irish folk-punk bands, The O’Reilly’s & the Paddyhats.
A client reported that a SmartConnect integration they’d been using for a couple of years had started failing regularly. It was scheduled to run in the early hours on every week day, but was failing most of the time; oddly, it was working sometimes.
